Many religions, typically Eastern religions such as Buddhism6 and Hinduism7, assert that everyone lives through a long succession of lives and that the material world and all conscious beings are separated from Nirvana. The cycle of rebirth (samsara) is a cycle of angst, pain and delusion, and only escape from the whole system can end suffering. To escape you need to attain enlightenment, and it is your desires, wants and carnal side that prevents this from happening, in Buddhism the being that represents the distractions of the real world is called Māra. The bad guys of the Buddhist the Pāli Canon are "dominated by the single figure of Māra" and long passages are devoted to this 'Evil One'8.

Reference to Māra in the Buddhist cannon, and its etymology, identify it with the very concept of death (and life, and consciousness, and all other Earthly things). "It is connexion with death, but particularly the overcoming of death, that Māra is often mentioned in the Canon. In this context death is always regarded as an evil, the unwelcome Antaka, the ender of an existence which is not ready to be ended"9. Māra represents darkness and blindness10 and all the sensory pleasures11. The full extent of Māra's power is utterly formidable to everyone except those on the verge of enlightenment, and is generally formidable even to those who have been following the eightfold-path for some time:

'Mine, recluse, is the eye, mine are material shapes, mine is the field of visual consciousness. Where can you go, recluse, to escape from me? Precisely mine, recluse, are the ear, sounds, the field of auditory consciousness; the tongue, tastes, the field of gustatory consciousness; the body, touches, the field of tactile consciousness; precisely mine, recluse, is the mind, mine are the mental states, mine is the field of mental consciousness.'

All these claims of Māra are conceded by the Buddha: 'Precisely yours, Malign One, is all this. But where there is none of this, there is no coming in for you.' [...] What emerges from these definitions is a conception of the whole of samsāric existence as the realm over which Māra rules. [...] In terms of Buddhist cosmology this is a way of referring to the whole of life apart from [Nirvana]. [...]

Enumerated in detail in the Suttanipāta [Māra's forces] consist of passion, aversion, hunger and thirst, craving, sloth and torpor, fear, doubt, self-will, cant, and various forms of self-exaltation. Prominent among these, and specially closely connected with Māra is the first, passion (kāma, or rāga).”

An author who has studied Māra and the Christian Satan, Ernst Windich, came to the conclusion that despite some striking similarities, there are an equal number of striking differences, and that each idea really did develop independently13. It seems easy to see that where Māra and the Christian Satan mesh well is exactly in the way that us humans excel at creating abstract personalities from real-life problems (why is there evil, suffering and death in the world?), and where they mesh least well is in the theological and philosophical underpinning of the arch-enemy of mankind.

Erricker, Clive(1995) Buddhism. Part of the TeachYourself Books series. A paperback book.

Hinnells, John R.. Currently professor of theology at Liverpool Hope University.(1997, Ed.) The Penguin Dictionary of Religions. Originally published 1984. Current version published by Penguin Books, London, UK. References to this book simply state the title of the entry used. A paperback book.

Momen (1999). P129 for Christianity. Māra has the same role in Buddhism.^

"Buddhism and the Mythology of Evil" by Trevor Ling (1997)14 quotes Sir Charles Eliot on p46: "No sect of Hinduism personifies the powers of evil in one figure corresponding to Satan, or the Ahriman of Persia'".^

"Buddhism and the Mythology of Evil" by Trevor Ling (1997)14 p43 says: "The demonology of the Pāli Canon is dominated by the single figure of Māra, the Evil One. Long passages are devoted to teaching about the Evil One, especially in the Majjhima, Anguttara and Samyutta-Nikāyas. [...] The principal sources for the Māra legend are: the Padhāna Sutta; the collection contained in the Māra-Samyutta and the Bhikkunī-Samyutta; the Māratajjaniya Sutta; the Mahāvagga of the Vinaya Pitaka [and others]". Although p70-76 Ling also notes that the concept of Māra is sometimes more popular amongst monasteries but less in the general populace.^